Windows Phone 8

Microsoft has pushed out a clutch of new and updated Bing apps for Windows Phone, including Bing Health & Fitness to track activities, diet, and medical information, and make suggestions as to how users can be healthier. The new smartphone software - which also includes Bing Food & Drink, and Bing Travel - aims to fill in some of the software gaps in Windows Phone, in addition to updating Bing Finance, Bing Sport, and Bing News, and adding cross-platform sync between Windows Phone and Windows 8.

Verizon has refilled its Windows Phone flagship spot, with the Nokia Lumia Icon distilling what we liked from the Lumia 1520 into a 5-inch form-factor with a crisp metal chassis and 20-megapixel PureView. Fronted by a 5-inch, 1080p Full HD OLED ClearBlack display, and running Windows Phone 8 on Qualcomm's 2.2GHz Snapdragon 800 quadcore, what the Lumia Icon is particularly focusing on is video recording quality, both in terms of image thanks to the oversampling and lossless zoom of PureView, and a more impressive soundtrack with directional audio recording. Check out our first impressions after the cut.

This week a piece of legislation is making its way through to the state level in California, a piece of legislation that would mandate a so-called "Kill Switch" for smartphones on every device inside state lines. Of course this legal document isn't about the state wanting to turn off smartphones in waves - instead it's about making the devices less accessible to thieves. This piece of law would have every smartphone manufacturer wanting to sell a device in the state of California legally bound to including a way to cut off service to the device remotely.

There's an update for the app called Cinemagraph out there this week that allows the user to export the media created by the app through the camera of the mobile device it's on. With the original release of Cinemagraph, users were able to share their moving-image creations with the ecosystem created for the app itself. With this release, the app is opened up to a much more free system.

Supposing you've had a peek at the Nokia smartphone platform over the past few years, you know good and well two things are true. The first is that Nokia runs either Windows Phone or an odder, smaller operating system called Asha. The second is that the phones made by Nokia are brightly colored, uniquely shaped, and certainly aren't made for Android. This second affirmation seems to be breaking apart at the seams here at the start of 2014.

"Better late than never" is a cliché that seems especially appropriate for Nokia. It's been a few months in the making but the promised Lumia Black update is finally here to bring some high-end features to a large number of Nokia's Windows Phone 8 Lumia phones.

This week the most powerful camera phone on the planet - so to speak - has recieved a software update from Microsoft. The Nokia Lumia 1020 with its beastly back-facing camera will be rolling with Lumia Black, the newest in Nokia-based Windows Phone software - as soon as this afternoon for users across the United States. The firmware piece of this equation appears - for now - to be hitting the Lumia 1520.

Microsoft's video-selling kingdom has arrived in Xbox form for their mobile devices in the Windows Phone 8 Xbox Video app. This app takes on all the abilities of the Xbox One's Xbox Video app, delivering you access to your account on the go. This app allows you to both buy and watch videos on your smartphone, adding these videos to your account that you can then watch on your Xbox One as well.

Windows Phone 8.1 will gain a Siri-style virtual personal assistant in an update expected in the first half of 2014, sources claim, with the new version also said to bring the much-anticipated notification center. Currently being internally tested though not expected to be publicly detailed until BUILD 2014 in April, The Verge reports, the update will supposedly see Bing search replaced with Microsoft's "Cortana" digital assistant, details of which leaked earlier this year.

There's a little bit of a shift going on at Instagram, one that makes the person-to-person exchange a real deal. This update is called "Instagram Direct", and it's essentially a messaging service inside the photo-taking social network. This update is coming to iOS today in Instagram 5.0, Android's Instagram 5.0 today as well - the Windows Phone version is still classified as being in beta mode, so we'll be waiting a bit longer on that front.